Campus cops pursued wrong man
2007-04-18 08:08
Jocelyne Zablit
Blacksburg - Investigators on Wednesday were piecing together a South Korean student's path to mass murder on a US university campus, as details emerged of possible missteps in the early hunt for the killer.
Police identified the gunman in Monday's killing of 32 students and staff at Virginia Tech university as Cho Seung-Hui, 23, media reports said. He was described as a student of English whose quiet behaviour and death-filled writings worried his classmates.
Amid widespread anger among survivors and relatives over the university's failure to lock down campus when a gunman was on the loose, investigators revealed they may have initially been pursuing the wrong man, US media reported.
Police said that during a more than two-hour gap between a first shooting on Monday, in which a female and male student were killed, and the second in which 31 were killed, they were pursuing the boyfriend of the female victim, the New York Times reported.
The female victim's roommate "told the police that (Karl D) Thornhill, a student at nearby Radford University, had guns at his town house," the newspaper said, quoting a police affidavit.
"The roommate told the police that she had recently been at a shooting range with Mr Thornhill, the affidavit said, leading the police to believe he may have been the gunman," it said.
"But as they were questioning Mr Thornhill, reports came in of widespread shooting at Norris Hall, making it clear that they had not contained the threat on campus," the Times wrote.
Doors chained shut
The delay meant Cho apparently had ample time to return to his room, take weapons and ammunition and head to the engineering building where he chained doors shut from the inside before shooting dead 30 people then turning his weapon on himself.
Police search warrants said a bomb threat note was found in the vicinity of Cho's body which it was "reasonable to believe" he had authored. Cho was also carrying knives on him, and at least one more knife along with prescription medications for depression were found in Cho's room.
Police recovered a 9mm handgun and a .22 calibre hand gun from the crime scene.
Cho, who came to the United States from South Korea in 1992 when he was eight years old, reportedly also left behind a rambling note venting his rage and complaining about "rich kids".
"You caused me to do this," he wrote in the several-page-long note that also railed against "debauchery" and "deceitful charlatans".
'Violent, aberrant behaviour'
Cho had shown recent signs of "violent, aberrant behaviour", including stalking women and setting a fire in a dorm room, the Chicago Tribune said.
Fellow students in a playwriting class remembered the killer as a mostly silent classmate who wrote gory dramas in a juvenile tone.
"The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of," wrote former classmate Ian MacFarlane who posted two of Cho's plays on aol.com.
"His writing, the plays, were really morbid and grotesque," student Stephanie Derry told the college newspaper, the Collegiate Times.
"He would just sit and watch us, but wouldn't say anything. It was his lack of behaviour that really set him apart. He basically just kept to himself, very isolated," Derry said.
Just across from the building where the massacre took place, thousands of students, faculty and community residents lifted candles in unison in an hour-long ceremony after night fell on Tuesday to honour those killed.
- AFP